Taking a shot

It's been a big year for Major League Lacrosse, the 4-year-old, six-city sports league hoping to capitalize on a growing national interest in the sport.

But it's still got a long way to go.

While the league is still writing its bottom line in red ink, it posted its first profitable championship series this summer, held at Boston University's Nickerson Field, where the Boston Cannons franchise plays.

It was a slim profit margin of $24,000, but compared with the $102,000 last year's three-day tournament lost, Boston-based commissioner David Gross feels the league is turning a corner. There are plans to expand by two teams in 2006 and two more in 2008, a rate that Gross said should increase geographic demand without stretching the league too thin.

Overall, the league brings in slightly under $5 million a year in revenue; it lost about $2 million this year, a few hundred thousand dollars better than last year. It has roughly 30 employees league-wide.

Gross, who was the general manager of the Boston Cannons and is still a vice president, accepted the commissioner's role in December 2003 on the condition that the league move its headquarters to Boston.

The league was started by Jake Steinfeld, chairman of Body By Jake Enterprises; Dave Morrow, a lacrosse player at Princeton University, the U.S. World Team and the CEO of Warrior Lacrosse; and Timothy Robertson, the former CEO of The Family Channel and current chairman of Bay Shore Enterprises LLC.

It started off slowly, pooling the country's top players into two teams that toured the nation during the summer of 2000 to gauge interest.

"What they wanted to find out was, would fans pay to watch lacrosse, could they get sponsors, and how would it look on TV?" said Gross. "They were not only able to get sponsors excited, they were able to land the biggest fish -- Anheuser-Busch."

In early 2001, just prior to the first season, things were still far from ready. The league was preparing its schedule at a time when teams such as the Boston Cannons still didn't know where they would be playing.

Matt Dwyer, president and founding general partner of the Boston Cannons, said he and the team's principal investors put several hundred thousand dollars into startup costs and making the Boston Cannons profitable. Dwyer said he feels better about the league's prospects for long-term success with Gross running things now.

"It's inevitable that there will be things you don't anticipate (in starting up a sports league)," said Dwyer, who's also a principal at Boston-based real estate firm Spaulding & Slye Colliers. "But I had anticipated that it would be stronger and more business-oriented than it was."

Now the league is building momentum. Paid attendance was up 48 percent league-wide this year, even though some teams, like the Boston Cannons, have either cut back or eliminated advertising budgets almost entirely, he said.

Gross knows that at some point, the league will need to return to widespread media advertising. In Boston, aside from billboard advertisements, no money is being spent on advertising. As a result, the team showed its first profitable year, with about $100,000 in gross profits.

"After year one, we stopped doing radio and TV advertising," Gross said. "After year two, we stopped doing newspaper advertising. We'll barter the heck out of things, but we just won't do cash. And our attendance keeps going up."

This year's league championship tournament attendance grew from about 6,000 fans last year to 8,279 this year. The goal is to grow that number to 10,000. Boston averages the highest attendance league-wide, with an average 5,681 home attendance. The average ticket price across the league is $12.73; in Boston, it's $13.94.

"The biggest challenge has still been that I'm disappointed that more people don't come and watch this," Gross said.

Randy Vataha, president of Game Plan LLC, a Boston-based professional sports consultant, says that just because a sport has a substantial following at the high school and college level doesn't mean the fan base will carry over to the professional level.

"As soccer has taught us, just because a lot of kids play it, it doesn't mean it's a sport a lot of people will want to watch and follow," said Vataha, a former wide receiver for the New England Patriots and one of the founders of the 1980s' United States Football League.

Stability is always an issue with startup leagues, he said, so strong management is important.

"I think they have done an excellent job to get this far," Vataha said. "It's got real pockets of support. There's a real possibility of expanding the fan base."